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Astrogation
BETWEEN STARS (RAW: divide time by drift engine rating) A basic drift engine can travel 1 LY in 1 hour. The average distance between stars is 5 LY. Given how much fuel a tank can hold, LY/tank also represents hours/tank: While you don't necessarily take it one hop at a time, the shortest hops are the simplest to calculate, and the overall range the same. Upgrading your drift engine doesn't change how far you can travel on how much fuel, but it does change how long it takes to arrive on a given hop. A freighter with one fuel tank always has a maximum range of 60 LY, but with a major drift engine, it can arrive in 36 hours instead of 60 hours. Your actual travel time varies based on your shift rotation, both how long you stand and how many qualified crewmembers can take the wheel. (Long-haul truck drivers can tell you a thing or two about this.) Standard procedure is to relax during a hop, all-hands-on-deck for the transition, and then relax again, considering all actual Drift time to be downtime and minimizing time spent in hyperspace. IN-SYSTEM (RAW: thrusters do not impact travel time) The fuel costs in-system are inconsequential, even when taking as inefficient a route as possible; a colossal ship has colossal fuel tanks and colossal engines to match. It takes 10 hours with basic thrusters to travel from a solar arrival to a destination in the conservative habitable zone 1 AU away. You can improve on this two ways. First, you can get better thrusters. Second, you can get better astrogators. Plotting the best turn-and-burn is an art that takes numerous gravity wells and mechanical factors into consideration, and every 5 points by which you overcome the DC shaves the time it takes. The following table takes significant license with rounding things up/down/around for the sake of simplicity. Your actual DC depends on the data you have to work with. Make a Computers check; the result of this defines the base DC of your Piloting check to astrogate. Of course your Science Officer and Navigator can work together on this task. In the case of the hyperspace beacon, this is the DC for finding one you don't know is there. If you're on a common travel route, are properly licensed, and did your research, you'll know exactly where it is and have immediate access with no checks required; this is the most common scenario when you're not haring off into the frontier. In the event you're not heading for a planet in the CHZ, use the times above as your base before multiplying by the AU of your destination. Earth-Mars is half an AU, Saturn is 9.5 AU out, Neptune is 30 AU out; you'll want a good thruster to head out into the unknown in a timely fashion. IN-SYSTEM JUMPS An in-system jump is a sometimes necessary thing. Here, the DC depends on your jump target. The resulting time is how long it takes to actually get there from your arrival point. An in-system jump uses up a hop's worth of fuel and time regardless of distance travelled. --- *Hyper Drive Speed: Drive Rating in LY per hour *Hyper Drive Fuel Cost: Ship Size * Drive Rating * 100 = Fuel Cost per light year (in kilograms) *Super Cruise Speed: Thruster "Rating" * Drive Rating = AU/hour *Super Cruise Fuel Cost: Ship Size * Drive Rating * 10 = Fuel Cost per Hour *(Rating starting at 1 for thruster in that size category, adding 1 for each better one) *Acceleration/deceleration adds about 50% to the travel time. *The conservative habitable zone is about 0.75-1.25 AU, with an extended habitable zone of 1.25-2.5 AU. So double the time and fuel estimate for those.